I’ve never been into science fiction or fantasy, the genres of fiction typically associated with geeks. I actually don’t have all that much exposure to it—I never heard of Piers Anthony or Robert Heinlein, to name a couple of well-known writers, until I started hanging out with male geeks in college and grad school. (I’d been off at Catholic all-girls schools for high school, and even though I attended a few meetings of the science fiction club my freshman year, the real reason was to hang out with the few girl geeks, not because I watched Dr. Who, which I still haven’t seen.)

It’s not that I’m against reading science fiction either. But my preferred genre has long since been literary fiction (and I know that some science fiction qualifies as this as well). This might make me less of a geek, except for the fact that I’m a huge Richard Powers fan.

Haven’t heard of him? Neither had most people in the U.S. until he won the National Book Award in November 2006 for his novel The Echo Maker. OK, so maybe that means most people in the U.S. still haven’t heard of him. But you, dear readers, are all geeks if you have found our page, and you might like to know about the fiction of this writer who often incorporates science and technology into his stories.

I’ll admit that The Echo Maker wasn’t my favorite book of his, because it didn’t have a love story like The Gold Bug Variations or Galatea 2.2. (So maybe I’m also into the romance genre, which is such a gender-appropriate thing for me to like. Underneath my unsentimental rational facade, I’m really just a woman who wants to be love and be loved.) It’s still a tremendous work, though, and I probably should read it again to get the parts that I missed the first time around.

But I’ve read all of Powers’s books, some multiple times (can’t get enough of Gold Bug! Makes me cry at the end out of the sheer beauty of it all every time!). And they all are crammed with ideas, learning, and connections between scientific and humanistic areas that you never even considered. I read a quote somewhere to the effect that Richard Powers novels are the reward for a good liberal arts education. Yes, indeed.

And so what I’d like to know is, why do the Germans get Powers while we don’t? Besides, of course, that their country is now run by a female geek—Angela Merkel earned a doctorate in physical chemistry—the Germans buy Powers novels like they’re going out of style:

RICHARD POWERS has no idea whether his fame spiked in America after he won the 2006 National Book Award for fiction last month. He didn’t stay in the country long enough to find out. Four days after the New York ceremony, the 49-year-old Illinois novelist jetted to Germany for a week of auditorium readings and TV interviews. It was a trip scheduled not because his ninth novel, “The Echo Maker,” had won the big award but because, he said from Frankfurt, “It’s like I’m a rock star here.”

Powers wasn’t boasting. His tone, as he spoke from his hotel the day after Thanksgiving, was one of grateful amazement. His 2003 novel “The Time of Our Singing,” a 650-page saga about race and classical music, sold 290,000 copies in Germany. In America, the gentle, erudite novelist has the critical status of a literary giant. (Novelist Margaret Atwood recently compared him to Herman Melville.) But his novels of ideas are seen as an esoteric taste here, and “Time of Our Singing” sold only 21,000 copies.

(From an article by Kevin Berger in the Los Angeles Times, Dec. 10, 2006)

It’s the next best illustration of cultural differences—oh, and on so many levels!—after this.

This entry was posted by Kristin A. on Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 at 9:03 am and is filed under Beautiful geekery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.